Magnus Berg (qmgb@bull.se)
Tue, 17 Feb 1998 13:54:42 +0100
Hi Donny and squad
Donald T Palmgren wrote:
>
> O-kay we have two possibilities about what counts as understanding
> in philosophy: (1) seeing where it all fits in relation to itself --
> somebody once said "Philosophy is the study of its own history," and in
> universities it by-and-large is, and (2) what I call the "machine idea" --
> that a philosophical system is like a machine that, if you've understood
> it, you can climb inside and make it run for you -- if you understand the
> MoQ then you can, say, explain Chaos theory in MoQ terms. Can anybody
> name other tests of understanding?
Not really, just that (1) is what we call philosophology and (2) is what
we call philosophy. Pirsig uses those terms and we tend to follow him in
these matters.
> See this facinates me because philosophers can't agree on what
> philosophy is. If you give a friend a coppy of ZMM to read and they ask,
> "Why should I?" what will you say?
> In medicine what counts as understanding -- bottom line -- is that
> you can heal the sick. What counts as understanding in philosophy? I'd
> like to keep this as a running side-bar to our walk through German
> Idealism/MoQ, if that's cool. When we get to Hegel on the far side of
> Kant he'll say that philosophy has no content, and has no form either. (?)
This is not that strange really. Remember that philosophy is a meta science,
it's on a different level of understanding than i.e. medicine. What Pirsig
counts as understanding in philosophy IMHO is that you can heal science.
> But before I press on to Kant I'll first re-emphasize my Sub-Ob vs
> Mind-Body point. In the Anglo-Amarican tradition we're infected w/
> Decartes and tend to interpret Sub-Ob as insubstantial-substantial.
>
> "Quality can not be independently derived from either mind or
> matter."
> -- RM Pirsig, "Subjects, Objects, Data and Values" p.12
>
> But if you read the German Idealist this way then you'll missrepresent
> them. So, there, when you see "subject" and "object" you can substitute
> "knower" and "known."
I substitute subject with knower, mind, subjective, insubstantial etc.
I substitute object with known, matter, objective, body, substantial etc.
I sense that you might not, please elaborate.
> The other set of (related) words that Pirsig throws around are
> "subjective" and "objective" -- what do they mean?
> Well, something is objective if it is a "brute fact." If I look at
> a blue shirt can I convince myself that I am seeing green? Well, I can
> imagine a green shirt there, but I'm still looking at a blue shirt. (You
> could say, "Well, you might wear colored glasses, or you could be color
> blind," but these sort of objections stand out because they contrast w/
> the vast manifold of instances in which we all agree. 99.9 % of the time
> we can agree that the male cardinal has red plumage and the female,
> brown.) The existance of science depends upon brute facts.
> If something is not a brute fact then we say it's "subjective."
> Star constilations are a good example. I can look at a cluster and see it
> as now one thing, now another. Or think of cloud wathching. Now even
> subjective things can be by-and-large's -- by and large Picaso is
> considered the greatist artist of the last 100 years, but not everyone
> likes Picaso, and one might be at one time more atracted to his early work
> and at another more attracted to his late works. And in Golden Age Athens
> Picaso would not have been appreciated at all. Go back to our star
> constilations: By and large we see the European Zodiac, but there is a
> whole different zodiac for Native Amaricans.
> The purpose of LILA was to account for the apparent subjectivity
> in taste -- to explain, as it were, the koan of the brujo. Regardless of
> what he says, Pirsig is constantly trying to make Quality, goodness,
> excellence... into a brute fact -- to render it objective.
No, your reasoning just shows that you are still submerged in SOM. What
Pirsig means with "Quality can not be independently derived from either
mind or matter." is precisely that Quality *can not* be rendered objective,
because objective, and subjective, are derived from Quality.
> I'm sure that's longer than it needs to be, but there's a reason
> for clearifying all these words so we know just what we mean. If Pirsig
> wants to get rid of SOM then it's significant if what he really means is
> MBd, because that's something the German Idealist set out to do while not
> at the same time rendering the world totally subjective (as Hume did --
> 'it's all in your mind').
As I said earlier, I don't see the difference between SOM and MBd. However,
the MoQ is none.
> Okay, now I promise, next time: Kant! And I'll show you how Kant
> re-defines "object" in a pretty wild and original fashion (much like
> Pirsig did w/ his "static patterns of value").
Pirsig did not define object with SPoV. SPoV is both subject and object.
Magnus
-- "I'm so full of what is right, I can't see what is good" N. Peart - Rush-- post message - mailto:lilasqd@hkg.com unsubscribe/queries - mailto:diana@asiantravel.com homepage - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4670
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